Ubuntu 17.10 development is in prorgress, now you can enable dock in default session

Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark is going to be the first stable release of Ubuntu after the Canonical's decision to discard unity shell in favor of matured GNOME shell. As a part of this, Canonical is trying their best to deliver unity like experience in GNOME shell.

Ubuntu 17.10 Default Session with dock enabled.

The implementation of unity experience in GNOME shell is in progress. On the 5th day, the developers has introduced a dock extension on top of GNOME to give an experience similar to dock in unity shell. This dock is originally forked from popular dash to dock extension for GNOME shell. Though, it will be providing less customization options comparing to original extension. The dash to dock extension was forked to maintain it as package and to ensure proper QA before shipping it to the user. Users can not avail any update for the dock after an Ubuntu release, except for bug fixes.

Following will be major difference between dash to dock extension and proposed Ubuntu dock.

The less visible change but more important one is probably the extension ID, description and such, to separate our dock from Dash to Dock as explained previously.

The dock is always visible by default, taking full height and
reduced spaces between icons, a little bit less opaque than the default.
It has a fixed width (not depending on the number of applications
pinned or running), and uses Ubuntu colored orange pips to denote
running apps. If the dock is set to intellhide mode, it’s taking every
windows on the workspace into account and not only the currently focused
one.

If you are running a development version of Artful Aardvark, you can install and experiment with each and every Vanilla GNOME to Unity experience transformation phases by installing the specially prepared official transition PPA. This can be done using a PPA add command

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-desktop/transitions

Once the repository is enabled, perform a regular system update, logout and login back to the shell. You can see what all features are implemented yet for Vanilla GNOME to Unity experience transformation.